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Profiling MLS Player Pipelines

Continuing my exploration of MLS team’s infrastructure behind-the-scenes, here I am trying to holistically look at the entire developmental pipeline for each MLS team, from the youngest academy team, to the oldest academy team, and on through USL club/reserve team to the first team. I include the latter aspect because there are already a handful of article ranking MLS academies online. I also wanted to do a seperate article on reserve teams for this series so I’m essentially combining the two ideas here.

For each team I am going to look at how many age groups their academy includes, how much money goes into their academy, whether they have a U-23 team (not usually considered an academy team) whether their reserve team is directly operated by the club or an affiliate club, how many academy players have signed for the first team (Homegrown Players), and how many academy players have been sold for a profit.